The Opera Platform: is this the Konfabulator for mobile?

The Opera Platform™ SDK is an SDK for developing rich client-side web applications on mobile devices such as Symbian Series60 phones (MS Smartphone support coming soon). With the Opera Platform™ Application Player, developers can create applications that interact with the phone’s native functionality, such as the phone’s address book, calendar or message store. In addition, developers can, using Ajax technology, interact directly with a multitude of web services, both home-grown and pre-existing.

(Technorati tags: opera | ajax | s60)

A few months ago Google bought Urchin, provider of web analytics software ‘used by over 20% of the Fortune 500′ and also, until their recent move, by TextDrive where this site is hosted. TextDrive seemed unable to re-negotiate a site license for Urchin (and began work on a home-grown Ruby on Rails solution code-named Anemone). Here’s the reason why: Google Analytics, released today, is essentially Urchin 5 for free. And I was just thinking about buying Mint.

If you’re looking for something more immediate (Google Analytics only updates every hour), try Tom Dyson’s Peastat a simple, free, ‘live’ web stats analyser which “looks at the last chunk of your log file to create real-time summaries of recent user activity” and best of all provides an Atom feed.

(Technorati tags: google-analytics | textdrive | mint | peastat)

In the first in an occasional series of ‘linked links’ and by way of tribute to Merlin Mann’s5ives here are some great stories from the English version of Aftenposten, Norway’s ‘leading quality daily’ that I’ve bookmarked at del.icio.us* recently.

(I’m half-Norwegian, so I enjoy keeping up-to-date with what’s happening in the ‘motherland’, but it’s a great feed nevertheless.)

More del.icio.us bookmarks.

(*apart from the impossible url, the other problem with del.icio.us is that you can’t use the name as a verb, in the same way that you can google, skype or digg something or someone: surely a prerequisite for any ‘Web 2.0′ service)

(Technorati tags: norway | delicious)

I spent some time yesterday playing around with the Skype API because I wanted to see if I can initiate text-to-speech calls for a project we have in development.

Seems like the Mac OS X API, like the Skype app itself, lags a little behind the Windows/Linux versions and the Applescript interface (which is easiest to use from a cgi script) is only partially implemented.

I did manage to get a simple web-based IM sending app running on OS X server. Try this form to Skype and I’ll post your message here as a comment:

This obviously only works if I’m online too. Seems to get queued in the Skype cloud even if I’m not.

(I’m not providing a generic web to Skype gateway here, for that try InstantSkype.)

(Technorati tags: skype | applescript | os-x)

Jon Udell’spost (via Lifehacker) on Alex Bosworth’s hack to save semi-private delicious bookmarks using the for:yourname tag prompted me to fix an aspect of my use of delicious that has been bugging me recently.

For a while now, I’ve been using a variation on Frasier Speirs’ AppleScript to post to delicious directly from QuickSilver, tagging these GTD-style with @review, for those times when I want bookmark something quickly without going to the trouble of describing, annotating and tagging the link.

More often than not, this means that I end up with a whole list of raw urls I haven’t bothered to organise: not something I really want to share and not much use to me or other delicious users. The perfect place for these to appear would be in your delicious inbox (except that in delicious parlance, your inbox is a place for users/tags you’re subscribed to), but having them show up in your private for: bucket is a good substitute.

Trouble is, as Jon says: “I’d also like to be able to delete things in my for: bucket. That wouldn’t mean deleting the sender’s bookmarklets, but rather rejecting for: tags aimed at me.” If you use Alex’s generated bookmarklet you have no control over the source of your incoming for: tagged links. One solution to this is to create your own ‘feeder’ account (with username yourname.private for example) from which you can target links to your main account’s for: bucket and then delete them when you’re done.

So now, my QuickSilver action posts to my ‘feeder’ account, tagging links with for:robbevan, my ‘real’ account.

I still have a huge number of @review posts to deal with though…

(Technorati tags: delicious | applescript | quicksilver)

For some reason, my PowerBook decided not to recognise me this morning and wouldn’t allow me to log in. Eventually, I figured out I could reset my (corrupt) account’s password from the login window using my ‘master password’, but then I wasn’t able to start up to anything other than a blue screen. (Coincidentally, I’d earlier read that one of Mac OS X 10.4.3’s fixes - released today - addressed (an unrelated) issue in which high ASCII characters in a password could lead to a blue screen at startup, or prevent log in.) Previously I’d been able to fix this kind of problem by booting into single user mode and renaming Preferences and Caches folders as detailed in this Apple tech note, but today this didn’t help. I finally figured out I simply needed to reset my account’s password back to match that of my home folder’s FileVault disk image.

Apart from providing myself with a reminder of what to do next time, this post is by way of introduction to AppleJack, an excellent utility I came across today that enables you to run a set of tasks in sequence to repair your disk, repair permissions, validate the system’s preference files and get rid of possibly corrupted cache files, all without loading the GUI.

(Technorati tags: applejack | os-x)

(Note: this post was originally written on release of the Flex 2 alpha. I’ve since updated it for the Flex 2 beta.)

Macromedia recently announced Macromedia Labs and the availability of the Flex 2 product line alpha, which includes a new Eclipse-based IDE and a new high performance client runtime (Flash Player 8.5) alongside the development framework. Unfortunately, for now, development on the Mac is not supported and Macromedia only provide an installer for Flex Builder 2, the Flex Framework 2, Flex samples and command line tools for Windows.

So I set about trying to discover, if as with the 1.0 release, I could get the framework at least to run on OS X: and the short answer is yes, it’s relatively simple.

First of all you need to extract both the framework and the player from the Download for Windows. To do this, just unzip the relevant components from the .exe file. Assuming you’ve already downloaded FlexBuilder2_Beta1_Install.exe to your desktop, this script does exactly this and then copies the ‘frameworks’ and ‘lib’ directories to a flex2 directory in /Library and the Install Flash Player 8.5 OSX.dmg to your desktop. (Or you can obviously just run the installer on Windows and copy across the relevant files.)

Once you’ve got the framework installed, you can use mxmlc - the (Java) Macromedia Flex Compiler - from the command line or better still with Ant. Here’s a version of the ‘Hello World’ example Flex project from Macromedia’s Quick-start tutorials book with the simplest possible Ant build file: just download and run ‘ant’ (defaults to the ‘build’ task) in the Quickstart directory, and - assuming you’ve already installed the player - then open QuickStart.html. You should see the movie initialise and the words “Welcome to Flex” appear.

(I had no luck at all getting the IDE work, I did try extracting Flex Builder 2’s ‘features’ and ‘plugins’ directories and copying the contents of these to my Eclipse installation. Although I was then able to create a new Flex project, I wasn’t able to start the MXML editor which failed with a NullPointerException.)

(Technorati tags: flash | flex-2 | os-x)

Today I let my .Mac subscription expire. I’ve been a .Mac subscriber since Apple began charging for what was once a free service, but I can no longer justify the ‘equivalent of £5.75 a month’ for Apple’s suite of Internet services. I’ve grudgingly paid the $100 fee for the past couple of years, largely for the ability to sync my bookmarks, calendars and contacts across machines, even if each time I’ve felt vaguely conned at having to pay for something that ought to be free (the same feeling you get on finding out you need to purchase a new QuickTime Pro key with each version bump).

Even with the latest upgrade from 250MB to a mere 1GB of combined email/storage, as webmail .Mac really doesn’t cut it alongside Gmail and for $8/month with Strongspace I’ve got four times as much secure offsite storage.

So it’s goodbye .Mac.

Update: One of the things I did like about .Mac was Apple’s Backup app, which at version 3 was finally worthy of its name. Here’s a way to replicate Backup’s handy ‘Personal Data and Settings’ plan using rsync and Strongspace.

Update: ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch on why “Backup 3 is easily the worst piece of software Apple is shipping today”. Although version 3.0.1, just released via Software Update, may address some of these issues: “Backup 3.0.1 addresses file restoration and other issues and is highly recommended for all users of Backup 3.0″.

Update: on the subject of QuickTime Pro, here’s a fantastic rant about “the split between Quicktime and QuickTime Pro and what a silly anachronism it is”.

(Technorati tags: dot-mac | strongspace)

Went to see Matthew Herbert and his apron-clad ‘brigade’ perform Plat du Jour at the Barbican on Monday night. Unfortunately I couldn’t shake the feeling that Herbert and co were a little bored by the idea of a last London performance (they delayed the start for a few minutes trying to work out if they could do the whole thing in reverse, just to make it more interesting for themselves) and his slightly irritating assumption that most of the audience had seen it before seemed like a reason not to try too hard.

Their decision to pre-prepare many of the samples in order ‘to pick up the pace’ a bit was probably good for those who had previously been subjected to five-minute gaps between tracks, though I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed to not to see ‘Lenka Clayton’s great films about giant vegetables and lobster-eating competitions’ or Dani (Siciliano, Herbert’s wife), who didn’t make it in time to sing her vocals on ‘Celebrity’.

That said, the whole thing really was a compelling feast for all the senses, even if the accompanying smells prepared by two on-stage ‘chefs’ and fanned towards us were understandably a little heavy on the garlic and burnt toast. And being one of hundreds of people each simultaneously biting a perfect little Red Pippin at the start of ‘An Apple A Day…’ was fun, tasty and surprisingly loud!

Mugison’s wild, energetic opening set was hugely entertaining, especially for me when I was roped on stage from the front row to help project a video of his girlfriend onto his guitar so they could sing a duet together. ‘Mugi’ is apparently a big star in his native Iceland and his new album ‘Mugimama - is this monkey music’ is released in the UK on Herbert’s Accidental Records, who like to describe him as “a troubadour for the electronic age”, which seems apt.

My arrival back from Halifax with a live lobster for dinner re-ignited the ‘is it cruel to dispatch a lobster in boiling water’ debate in our household. I’ve always had a bit of a lobster fetish (I once had a fabulous Katherine Hammnet lobster t-shirt, now faded beyond recognition), so the mere presence of a live lobster in the house was a big thrill for me and especially for the kids.

In the back of my mind was a recent story concerning new Norwegian research into the welfare implications of everything from cooking live lobsters, keeping bees and the use of worms on hooks as bait, which concluded that invertebrates do not suffer pain, discomfort or stress. This is the ‘no brain, no pain’ argument. On the other hand organisations such as PeTA’s ‘Lobster Liberation Front’ dispute this and have dismissed the Norwegian findings as pandering to the (admittedly very powerful) Norwegian fishing lobby, maintaining that boiling a lobster alive is tantamount to torture. Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters, has a good summary of the arguments.

Whatever you believe, there’s no doubting the ethical dubiousness of a bizarre lobster game found in a video arcade in Japan (via Boing Boing and RocketBoom) and this: “an old sport turned into a new high profit vending game”.

And finally, whilst we’re on the subject, this seems like an appropriate point to link to an entry I wrote (in 1999, I think) on shellfish for h2g2, a Douglas Adam-inspired wikipedia-alike now owned by the BBC.